Recently I figured out that I can try out Azure as that comes as one of the benefits of having an MSDN account. I got 375 hours of free computing hours per month! Just for the fun of it I want to host a small VM which acts as a TeamSpeak server every now and then. I guess that’s not really what the Azure subscription is meant for in the MSDN package, but hey I’m experimenting and getting to know the possibilities of Azure in the meanwhile! Guess that’s a Win-Win right?

Either way, because I only have 375 hours that means I can’t have my VM deployed 24/7. I wrote some simple PowerShell scripts which basically remove the VM, leaving the VDH intact and recreate it whenever I want. That might be another blogpost if I find some time. But now I want the possibility to have my colleagues power it up whenever I’m not around. The following options were not OK:

Be on duty 24/7 with an internet connection at hand

Hand out my live-id to everyone

So here comes the, be it limited, delegation capabilities of the Windows Azure management infrastructure: it seems you need your live ID to log in via the web interface. But for the PowerShell cmdlets you can actually have up to 10 certificates! So here comes how to start toying around with that part of Azure.

Remark: I only used the Get-AzurePublishSettingsFile cmdlet as explained on Windows Azure Cmdlet Guidance for my initial Azure PowerShell configuration on my home PC. However it seems like if you run the command again it will just generate another Windows Azure very long name –date-credentials management certificate. So in the end you got no clue to who you handed out which certificate.

3. Export your certificate from your local store and store it somewhere safe

The makecert command created a .cer file which is good for the upload, but you have to make sure that from whatever computer you want to run your Azure PowerShell cmdlets you have the certificate with the private key available. So as in my case I created the certificate on my own PC, and I want my colleague to be able to connect to the Azure management API using PowerShell, I have to export the certificate (including the private key) and hand it over to him.